Behind the Wire

In 1938, Franklin M. Hoeffer boarded a transport and crossed the Pacific to join the Yangtze River Patrol. He was nineteen years old, assigned to the galley of the USS Oahu, and had no idea he was walking into the last years of peace. Three years later, he would leave Shanghai for the last time. Six months after that, he would watch four men get shot in front of the entire camp so everyone understood what happened to people who ran.

Behind the Wire is the story of a Navy ship's cook who survived three years and four months as a Japanese prisoner of war. From the bars and back alleys of Shanghai to the fall of Corregidor, through the suffocating holds of the hell ships, through the factory docks of Osaka and the air raids that lit the sky for ten hours straight, Frank Hoeffer kept feeding people. It was the only thing he knew how to fight with. When there was nothing left, he made something from nothing. When the rations ran out, he found another way. A cook holds his crew when nothing else can.

He told these stories once, during Christmas visits in the late 1970s, to his grandson Richard. Then Alzheimer's took them away.

This memoir is reconstructed from Frank's own written account of his captivity, from conversations that happened just in time, and from the record of a war most Americans have never seen from this angle: not the admirals and the generals, but a man with a ladle and a set of knives, counting rations and stretching nothing into something, keeping nine hundred men alive one meal at a time.

No one leaves this table hungry.

Based on the journal of Franklin M. Hoeffer II, U.S. Navy, 1914-1985.